Abstract
The difficulty between the avant-garde and the landscape is at bottom the by-product of a generic human tendency to differ over differing, the avant-garde being much given to it, while more traditional approaches to the landscape have typically sought to promote a sense of being in tune with the world. After drawing a basic distinction as to the meaning of “balance” and “dialectic,” the paper correlates the approach to balancing kinship and difference taken by each of four leading earthwork artists of the early 1970s with one of the more or less “natural” models for doing so afforded by sexuality and life, metaphor and mind, concluding that such modes of reconciliation and integration, being common to both sides because grounded in our nature, could point the way toward “reconciling” the avant-garde and the landscape.
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